ONLINE BUSINESS VENTURES

Here we are going to find out several avenues for making genuine money to take the fullest advantage of Internet and its most vital role in this advertisement bound age.

Create a Profitable Simple Product

If you are a product creator then your website is the best media to sell your product. You may sell your various products starting from electronics goods and ending up with soft toy. You can sell any or all of your products through the Internet.

Auction Buying and Selling

The emancipation of the cherished tradition of auction through action houses in the Internet era has given birth to an innovative way of auctioning over Internet. One can sell or buy by bidding at various sites through auction. One such most popular auction site is http://ebay.com. Rediff and Yahoo who also offer other auctioning facilities.

Actually the old method of auctioning used to be called as brick and mortar auction, has somehow reduced in the recent past, until it has found its resurgence today due to the Internet era. The prime advantage is that one can start looking for auction from the home comfort leaving the chaotic auction houses where the people used to reach after a lot of traveling. However the rule and charm of the auction remains the same. The seller displays his product and sells it to the highest bidder. Today one can start bidding even by $1. Another significant difference is auction was the stronghold of the rich people only but today it has been opened up even for the most ordinary ones.

The reach of Internet has put online auctioning on todays in-thing list just like online share trading. One can find many people are just sitting at home and fiddling with the computer on any online share site according to their whims.

So, today you can get the scope of selling your unutilized car which perhaps occupies your valuable space, as you can pick and choose items as per your requirements. The funniest part is that even air tickets are sometimes placed on auction.

Service Provider and Serve Others

You can sell you or your company as a service provider over the Internet. This service is generally categorised as online services. This means you should sell your services that may be done online. Like you may write website content, or design a program in C/ C++, or send a database solution online to the buyers. Design jobs are one such salient example, where physical presence hardly becomes a parameter for service. Article and content writing has reached a platform of popularity as has the concept of SEO been changed and people have started realising the need of SEO of which content is an inseparable part.

Affiliate Marketing

This is the origin of chain marketing. Affiliated programs remind us the cherished tradition of affiliation. Mostly you recommend people to the companys web sites and dollars start accumulating against your name. Suppose you are referring your friend to some companys website, you get an instant commission. Again, when your friend starts earning, you get the affiliation commission. Its based more on the concept of chain marketing and perhaps McDowell is the best example.

The payments and mode of payments vary from company to company. Some will pay you by cash or other tangible modes facilitating building a web site to refer to your affiliates. Some may offer you some official email-id for you to work while the advantage is that you dont even need to achieve success in such affiliated programs.

You are free to use the advantage of emails to your known and unknown sources for building your chain, keeping in mind the restricted email addresses. As soon as the reader of the mail clicks on the link provided by you for the affiliation, you score. Even if the person clicks by mistake, then also you get the reward!

Referral Programs

Before delving into it lets look at the very basic philosophy, for which the companies/ agents/ Market Research Companies/ Individuals pay you. The simplest logic is through referral programs. The people, who browse your site glance the other sites too, whose links/ banners are located at your site. When they visit the sponsor’s site from your site, then you are entitled to a payment. Google Adsense is one such typical referral program, but then it is just one basic step.

Now in some cases, they make it a point that the money will be paid to you, if and only if the visitor purchases goods or services from their sites. Then in such a situation the amount paid is also higher.

The world of chain marketing has increased the true value of referrals, where you can get even life time benefits, once you refer the sponsors to some buyer and you keep on getting paid for each occurrence of purchase either by your referred customers or anybody under that hierarchy.

There are various ways of referrals. Some are like Survey and Earn, where companies pay to take the survey; Read email and Earn, where companies pay to read e-mails; Surf and Earn, where companies pay to surf the Internet

Get Paid for Your Opinions

Major Corporate giants prefer to test the viability of their products through market research. You must have noticed various beta versions being launched by several companies including Microsoft. Even if the test of acceptability is a continuous endeavor. Might be, today people are using Ariel as their prime detergent but who can guarantee that whether or not another new detergent will pave its way to the consumers and the popularity of Ariel will gradually recede. Remember, in this competitive world, new brands are emerging everyday to challenge the brands who are holding their sway in the market. So, the companies want to research directly from the consumers to test their mindset. A continuous research only may reveal the level of acceptability and viability of their products and services. Generally filling out forms in the Web does it. Forms are sent either by email or to the website.

The popularity of Internet has also changed the process of the Market Research companies, who prefer to do their Research online instead of sending employees to call on the consumers at home or the market place. Moreover these surveys have found their ground, as they are impartial, accurate and cost-effective. Online research to find opinions of the consumers at large have found his sanctity more because it can work irrespective of geographical differences as well as the results are sent back in much lesser time. Now as per the golden rule that nobody wants to spend his time free of cost, the direct companies as well as the MR companies share their money with common people. So, they pay you for your opinion. There are some companies, who also announce prizes for the best slogan or opinion. Nevertheless, online survey is a good way of making money for the common people as well as the most cost-effective Research & Analysis for the corporate giants.

If you want to treat this as a home business, you only need a PC and Internet, wherein your investment is really negligible. Again one needs to be cautious of the websites that promise you an exceptional huge amount like $25 to $100 for every hour of service. Again and again one needs to be cautious of short cuts to becoming rich offers. So, be careful dont be lured into this world of allurement.

Read Emails and Earn Cash

We have discussed that marketing strategy is ever changing. One such real innovative way of marketing the products and services is marketing through emails. One may call it-reformed mailers, which used to reach the consumers through the postal media. Many renowned companies have started using this methodology for branding their promotions. If you are a member of yahoo or MSN or Rediff email services, you must have been receiving plenty of mails everyday. It may be the financial products or Computer printers. They always come up with some promotional or discount offers. Companies are also using emails for collecting information on the competitors products.

Companies want that their emails must be read properly and to ensure the proper usage of their emails they pay to you to read the emails. The emails are some usual promotional advertisements or even may be for gathering information on their competitors. Most of the emails you will find is encapsulated with a link to the original companys site. This link will open the advertisement. In this way they ensure the visit to their website and some of them force you to leave the ad open for a mere 30 seconds when they focus on their key features.

Paid to Surf the Net

If you remember we had been discussing about Paid to Surf methodology to make your website popular. Now some other companies want to popularise the website by paying the visitors for visiting. Some of them will require you visit their web site and spend a reasonable amount of time. There are various auto surf sites that advertise their sponsors through rotation. What happens if you just stick to the original web site, you will find the sites rotating in turn. Each of them may be displayed for 30 seconds. The sponsored sites may be displayed either in a separate frame or even in separate windows. They must be visible to you, like the Advertisements on Television. The only difference is that while surfing their sites, you can continue working, but in case of TV, you can watch only one channel at a time.

There are also several web companies that give you tools to display on your browser while you open it. Some of the tools are really useful like pop-up blockers or default search engine facilities. Some of them also pop up some virus or memory usage warning in your browser. Some of them are really scams, be careful.

Please note that there are a few search engines, which also pay you for searching your requisite keywords/ phrases through that search engine. So, just imagine, you search on the Internet and even for that you are paid!

As the auto surf sites are primarily to display Advertisements, some search engines also pay for using their services just to make it popular by increasing the hit count. Now again, you may also plan to submit your website in some auto surf site to gain popularity. But how do you select? The first and foremost question is that you need to find out the payout rates. You ought to be skeptical about the exemplary high payouts. One must also find out where your payment is coming from? Is it from the advertisers or is it truly from the visitors?

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About us

STEPHENAKINTAYO

Stephen Akintayo, also known as Africa’s premier Digital Marketing consultant is a Serial Entrepreneur, Inspirational speaker, Author and Philanthropist. He is currently the Chief Executive Officer of Stephen Akintayo Consulting International and Gtext Media and Investment Limited, a leading firm in Nigeria whose services span from Digital Marketing, Real Estate, and Consulting; Other services include Media Management, SME House, and hosts of others.